Jake Auchincloss

Dear Commons Community,

Ezra Klein podcaster and contributor to The New York Times, had an extensive interview with Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss, who makes several important comments on the state of the Democratic Party.  Here is an excerpt.

“After the election, I (Ezra Klein) started asking congressional Democrats I had talked to the same question: If they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said, they didn’t know. That’s a problem.

Democrats are in the opposition now — that means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics.

So one thing I’m going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find that alternative — crafting an agenda that is alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past.

One Democrat who has interested me is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts. Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, he has had particularly interesting things to say.

It’s not that I agree with every idea he offers here. I don’t. But when I hear him, I hear someone wrestling with the questions I posed to other Democrats: What is your alternative? What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn’t?

This conversation was recorded at the end of January. So you won’t hear the latest Trump news discussed. But that’s also not the point of this. The country needs a resistance. But it also needs an alternative.

Ezra Klein: Congressman Jake Auchincloss, welcome to the show.

Jake Auchincloss: Thanks for having me on Ezra.

After the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump’s particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.

I’m concerned that boldface-name Democrats have been leaning into populism. They have said: Boy, Donald Trump has done what we dreamed of — which was building a multiethnic working-class coalition.

The biggest city in my district, Fall River, Mass., is the exemplar of a multiethnic working-class city and voted for a Republican in 2024 for the first time in 100 years. And Democrats across the country have been looking at cities like Fall River and have said: Well, if they’re doing populism, we’ve got to do populism, too — whether that’s immigration or trans issues or the culture wars.

And my view on that is that voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke. There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be — and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That’s OK. There are two parties.

But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is cost of living — boy, we’d better win you back.

Democrats used to have a multiracial working-class coalition. They won voters making less than $50,000 by significant margins. They won nonwhite voters by significant margins. That was their coalition. What is your explanation of what broke it?

I think we were seen as taking our eye off the ball on both kitchen-table and front-porch issues. The notorious ad “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was not just about the particular salience of trans issues in this election but about a broader cultural thesis: that Democrats have taken their finger off the cultural mainstream.

Between the time when Bill Clinton played saxophone on live TV and peaking, I think, with Obama’s election in 2008 but persisting all the way through 2018, Democrats broadly were winning the culture wars. And MAGA’s big idea was: Maybe we can win the culture wars.

To a certain extent, they did. And I think Democrats now have to make very clear that has been a mask for an agenda that is not actually going to help people.

What you’ve seen in Donald Trump’s first week in office is that he’s siding with cop beaters and tech oligarchs. He’s not doing anything on housing, health care and taxes for the typical American family. We’ve got to drive that cost of living message home.”

The entire interview should be read and reread by the Democratic leadership.

Tony

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